Interview with an Author

Adrian Tchaikovsky is a science-fiction and fantasy author. His book, Children of Time, is set in the distant future where the remnants of humanity need to move on from Earth and set off on an epic journey to find a new planet. They discover a world terraformed and prepared for human life. But all is not right in this new Eden. The planet is not pristine and unoccupied. New masters have turned it from a refuge into mankind’s worst nightmare. Who will be victorious in this collision of two civilisations?

How did you get into writing?

Weirdly, from gaming – as in tabletop role-playing games. That was my creative/story outlet for years, and then TSR brought out the Dragonlance novels, which were books writing up a D&D campaign. That basically bridged the gap in my head from me, as a gamer, and Weiss and Hickman as professional authors, and I felt ‘I can do that!’. And I couldn’t, as it happened, because it takes work and practice and a long honing of writing style, but it was the start.

Throughout the novel, there are very interesting differences between the spiders’ societal advancements to human development – why did you use spiders instead of the more obvious monkeys to demonstrate this?

The spiders predate the book. Dr Fiona Cross’s research into the Portia labiata species was the inspiration, because she showed how fearfully bright the little spider is, far better at problem solving and complex ‘thinking’ than received wisdom says a spider should be. I wanted to run a thought experiment to see what might happen if the species had a clear run at becoming a dominant sentient species. And monkeys and other primates have been done by other writers. And I like spiders but I don’t really have much attachment to monkeys. And, frankly, Gareth Powell knocks them out of the park in Ack-Ack Macaque and Hive Monkey.

And the humans in the spaceship – we see what happens when the aim becomes to survive, whatever the cost, especially with an authoritarian rule. It’s quite an uncomfortable look into the human psyche. What was your inspiration behind that?

Well I feel quite uncomfortable about humans, so that kind of comes out in the book. I write about human power and capability dynamics as I see them (and to be frank, little in the intervening years since I wrote the book have really shifted me on that). And the human culture that limps off Earth for Kern’s World and the spiders is very much a ‘What Rough Beast’ sort of event. They’re a badly broken culture poured into a spaceship without anyone really thinking about how it’s going to work in the long run. Also there’s an obvious dynamic and contrast between the spiders, on their upward evolutionary curve, and the decline of their parent human culture.

Portia (or the different generations of Portia) is often a more relatable character than any of the humans on the spaceship – do you think that is because the humans no longer resemble a humanity that we would recognise now?

The humans resemble modern humanity very closely. They are us, and their culture is built from our ruins in our image. The spiders are arguably more sympathetic because they aren’t us. They certainly have their own internal conflicts and problems, but they have a thread of empathy to them that makes them sympathetic. Also I suspect that my own love of spiders comes out heavily on the page.

“Well I feel quite uncomfortable about humans, so that kind of comes out in the book”

What’s the next project that you’re working on?

As it happens, I have literally just sent off a submission draft of the third Children book to my agent, hopefully for onward transmission to the publisher. There’s already one sequel out in Children of Ruin, of course, and this will be another step further still. I’m now working on a new novella for Rebellion, a story of someone getting lost in a strange place to follow Walking to Aldabaran and One Day All This Will Be Yours.

And lastly, as this is our Time issue, if you could live in any time period, including the future, what would it be and why?

I’d love to visit various eras of the prehistoric past, but I suppose I wouldn’t want to live there. If there is a Culture-esque Banksian post-scarcity future out there, that would be the one for me. Otherwise… Well, there’s an oft-repeated maxim about time travel that most periods are great if you have some modern kit and are of the right demographic to live as a rich person. I’d like to go back to the Harappan civilization of the Indus Valley and future-proof it so that it stuck around, maybe. It seems to have been pleasantly enlightened, what with big cities with all sorts of mod cons long before the Romans came along, and no big house for rich people.